The Comparative Study On Compensation Legal System Of Ship Oil Pollution Of China And American

China is a country with a vast sea area. In recent years, economy develops so fast that our demands for oil have been growing. According to the input data, it shows that our demand for oil is increased by17.5 percent by 2009. At the same time, 90 per cent of china'imports of oil depend on the shipping. Large oil imports inevitably bring threat of oil pollution to the country. However, the existing legislation does not have specific laws for the civil liability for shipping oil pollution damage. And some of the relevant provisions just appears in different laws and regulations, such as the"GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE CIVIL LAW","ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION LAW","REGULATIONS OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ON THE PREVENTION OF VESSEL"etc. Faced with such problems, our country is very necessary to establish our own compensation legal system of ship oil pollution.OPA1990 in the United States should be a successful example which provides comprehensive legal provisions for all aspects of oil pollution controlling and compensation. Although it is the domestic law of the United States, our country could benefits from the advantages of this system for the building of our system. This paper tries to compare OPA1990 to the relevant provisions in China as the beginning, and then analyze and contracts the different provisions of the two countries, with experience of international law rules. By this way, the writer hopes to provide some useful reference to the building of our country's compensation legal system of ship oil pollution. This paper is divided into five parts.The first part introduces both countries'existing compensation legal system of ship oil pollution. And then it pointed out that the most important law for controlling oil pollution-OPA1990 works with a series of rules which were formulated in the United States since the 19th century in governing ship oil pollution. At the same time, by introduction of the background of china's oil pollution rules, it shows that in this field China is still of double-track system at present.The second part of the paper is criterion of liability and defenses. Firstly, the paper introduced that the principle of oil pollution of ships is different from the traditional principle—the ship owner'protectionism. And then by comparison and analysis, we know that the two countries all apply the principle of strict liability. But the two countries are not identical in the degree of the principle of strict liability, which is reflected by the defenses'difference. We could say that the principle in American is more severe than ours.The third part pays attention to responsibility, liability insurance and the direct action. Also by comparative analysis, we can make a conclusion: in the part of responsibility, American's scope is the largest and the international treaty is smaller than it's, the provisions of our country which is lack of real illustrate just does not seemed transparent; liability insurance and direct action system in the two countries have provided that there are just the details differences, but the consequences will be quite different from the different details, which is worth our consideration.The fourth part is about the problem of fund. Through the fund system'review with domestic and foreign, we can make a conclusion that foreign fund system which we need is not in our present system. what is more, the paper point out that our domestic fund system'inadequacy in the parts of source of funds, the agency in organizing and so on, at the same time, we should learn from the trust fund'legislative principle for the oil pollution which is paying attention to the emergency response of threat of the accident.The last part mainly discusses how to perfect china's compensation legal system of ship oil pollution. By the previous sections of the study of paper, the writer think that we can perfect out system from the follow things: improving terms in our shipping oil system, making the defenses more severe, making the system of direct action and responsibility more perfect. At the same time, we should also establish our own domestic level of the fund system. The writer puts forward her own views about the domestic fund system, for example, after a prolonged development the fund should be defined as trust fund, the amendments of some details in the provisions about fund, etc.